“My granddaughter is dead,” Younger said. “My daughter-in-law has disappeared, and my son is dissolute and perhaps in a dangerous state of mind.”
“What’s that got to do with me?” Wyatt asked.
“Be patient. I’m trying to set some things straight without causing unnecessary harm to anyone. Have you seen my son?”
“I wouldn’t know what he looks like. What the hell is this?”
“What would you do if a great amount of money came into your hands?” Younger asked.
“I’d ask what the trade-off was, ’cause ain’t nothing comes free. Second of all, I’d probably say kiss my ass, ’cause I ain’t interested in what other people own.”
“Then you’re a rare man.”
“You didn’t answer my question about Jack Shit.”
“A man named Clete Purcel attacked him.”
“You let Louisiana Fats knock you around?” Wyatt said to Boyd.
“Listen to me, son,” Younger said.
“Take your goddamn hand off me. Don’t be calling me ‘son’ again, either.”
“The fates have not been kind to you. I want to correct that if I can. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
“No, I got no idea. I’m getting pretty tired of it, too. How come you always got guys like this around? People that’s been inside or belong there?”
“I try to give other men a second chance. Pap, why did he beat you? Why did he have such animus toward you?”
“Ani-what?”
“You’re part Shawnee Indian, boy. It’s in your profile. Your people were trash, but you’re a warrior. Look at my hands, look at yours. Those are hands that could break down a brick wall. How do you think you ended up the man you are? You think your genes came from your worthless father or your whore of a mother? Was it the nigger in the woodpile?”
“You get the fuck away from me, old man,” Wyatt said.
He threw his cotton candy and Bertha’s tater pig in a garbage barrel and walked behind the bucking chutes, a sound like fireworks popping in his head. He squatted in the sawdust and began buckling on his spurs.
“You’re not up, Wyatt,” a cowboy said.
“Hell I ain’t.”
“I’m just doing my job.”
Wyatt lifted his eyes to the cowboy’s face. “Do I got to say it again?”
He climbed on top of the chute while his horse was loaded, then eased down on its back, hooking his left palm through the braided suitcase handle on the bucking rig. Like most rough stock, the horse was almost feral, walleyed, jerking up its head, its body quivering with fear and rage at the confines of the chute, knocking against the wood sides, trying to kick itself free of the flank strap.
Wyatt fixed his hat and steadied himself. “Outside!” he said.
He was once again borne aloft, his legs up, his body springing backward almost to the croup, the rowels of his spurs slashing down, the twelve hundred pounds of gelding thudding so hard into the sod that Wyatt thought his sphincter had been broken and he was about to urinate into his athletic supporter. He’d drawn Buster’s Boogie, a hot-wired gelding that had crippled a rider for life at the Russian River Rodeo in California. Buster’s Boogie sunfished twice, then corkscrewed and twisted sideways unexpectedly, all within three seconds. Wyatt saw the grandstand begin rotating around him, then the bucking chutes, then the Ferris wheel, then the greased faces of the clowns by the rubber barrel, as though he were stationary and the entire world, even the stars embroidered on the pink sky, had all become part of a giant Tilt-A-Whirl that had gone out of control and was doing things that had never happened to him before.
He felt the gelding explode under him with renewed energy, prying Wyatt’s clamped legs loose from its sides, flinging him high in the air, his shoulders and back still hunched in a rider’s position, the suitcase handle slipping beyond his reach, the ground suddenly coming up like a fist, the blat of the eight-second buzzer coming too late, almost like a pent-up mockery that had never been allowed to express itself.
He heard the thud when he struck the sod, then all sound went out of his head, as though he had been plunged deep underwater, his lungs collapsing like punctured balloons, his eardrums about to burst. He saw the pickup rider coming hard toward him, swinging down from the stirrup, a paramedic running with a first-aid bag, the crowd rising in unison, their faces filled with pity and sorrow.
I’m all right, he wanted to say. I just got the wind knocked out of me. There ain’t no problem down here. Just let me get on my feet. Anybody seen my hat? Why y’all looking at me like that? Have I done gone and messed myself?
His shirt was wet. He clutched it in his fingers and pulled it loose from his belt and saw the starlike wound where his championship silver buckle had punched a hole in his stomach, releasing a fluid that felt more like water than blood.