'People who didn't have a sackful of beans took on John D. himself,' L.Q. said. 'Their strike got broke and Rockefeller come out here and danced with a miner's wife and made headlines.'
'How you know so much about it?' I asked.
'That's my great-grandmother's name up there, bud.'
Darl Vanzandt's '32 Ford passed us, its dual pipes throbbing against the asphalt. If he noticed Mary Beth and me, he didn't show it. Across the street, a girl in shorts sat astride the barrel of the Spanish-American War artillery piece, her hands clenched around the metal.
'What are you thinking about?' Mary Beth said.
'Nothing. It's a great country,' I said.
'You worrying about Lucas?'
'On his worse day, I'll take that kid over this whole street.'
She slipped her arm inside mine and squeezed it against her.
On Saturday afternoon Mary Beth and I took Pete to the rodeo at the county fair grounds. The parking lot was filled with pickup trucks and horse trailers, the viewing stands and midway packed, and a gentle brown haze lifted off the arena while a parade of mounted cowboys rode by the stands, American and state of Texas flags flying over their heads, and carnival rides reared and dipped in the sky.
We bought cotton candy and hot dogs and strolled past the chutes, where boys barely out of high school stood in clusters or perched up on the slats in skin-tight jeans, butterfly chaps, wide-brimmed black Stetsons, rayon shirts with outrageous mixes of the rainbow, and belt b
uckles polished like Cadillac bumpers.
They were West Enders and blue-collar kids from adjoining counties, their hair mowed into their scalps, their necks cuffed with sunburn. They postured and chewed Red Man and stuck wads of snuff between their lips and gums and tried to talk older than they were, but no one could deny the level of their courage.
The horses they rode sunfished out of the chutes while the rider tried to bring his spurs above the withers, one hand flung into the sky, his spine twisting like it was about to break loose from the tailbone.
Or they tied down their inverted palms on bulls that exploded between the legs when the chute opened, entering that breathless moment inside a vacuum before the bull's hooves touched the sod again, the cowbell clanged from its cinch, and the muscles in the bull's back seemed to wrench the rider's entrails out of his rectum.
They got pitched headlong into the dirt, trampled, stove in, flung against the boards, and sometimes hooked, the bull's horn piercing lung and kidney, tossing the rider in the air, trundling him across the arena like a cloth doll while clowns who wore football shoes tried to save the rider's life with a rubber barrel.
As L.Q. might say, you could find a worse bunch.
We were out on the midway when we saw a country band assembled on a stage by a grassy area flanked with booths that sold Indian jewelry. In the back of the band was Lucas Smothers, his sunburst twelve-string guitar slung around his neck on a cloth strap beaded with flowers.
It was the first time, to my knowledge, he had played anywhere since his arrest. The band kicked it off with 'The Orange Blossom Special' and 'Bringing in the Georgia Mail,' then bled right into Hank Snow's 'Golden Rocket.' Lucas stepped to the front of the group and held the sound hole of his guitar to a microphone on an abbreviated stand and went into an instrumental ride that was beautiful to hear and watch. His left hand corded up and down the frets, never pausing, never making a mistake, while the plectrum flashed across the strings over the sound hole, the double-strung octave notes resonating like both a bass guitar and a mandolin.
No one on the stage could approach his performance. But when he finished his solo, which also ended the song, the applause was broken, muted, like cellophane burning and then dying. I could see the emptiness in Lucas's face, his eyes blinking, one hand fiddling with his back pocket, as though he could hide his embarrassment there.
But the leader of the band, a decent man from Austin who well knew his audience, was not one to let a wrong go unchecked. He picked up the microphone and said, 'That boy can do it, cain't he? That was gooder than my mama's grits…' He extended his arm back toward the band. 'Lucas Smothers, ladies and gentlemen, Deaf Smith's own! How about giving him and the whole band a big hand?'
One of those loudest in his applause was Darl Vanzandt, who stood at the back of the crowd, a smear of cotton candy on his mouth. Three girls, slightly younger than he, were with him. When the band took a break, he touched one of the girls on the shoulder, and she and her two friends went to the stage and began talking excitedly to Lucas.
'What cha studying on?' Pete said.
'Oh, not much,' I said, and ran my palm over the soft top of his crewcut.
'Turn loose of it, Billy Bob. He'll be all right,' Mary Beth said.
'No, he won't,' I said.
She looked at my face, then followed my eyes to Garland T. Moon, who sat on top of a loading chute to the left of the stage, eating a snow cone, crunching the ice to the top by squeezing his fist tighter and tighter along the cone. Darl Vanzandt gave him the thumbs-up sign.
Later, I looked down from the stands and saw Moon wandering along the main aisle, smiling, staring up at the crowd with friendly approval, as though he were one of us, a member of the community enjoying a fine day. He bought a fresh strawberry snow cone from a vendor and bit into it like he was a starving man and it was wet fruit. He touched the pigtails on a little girl's head and brushed his loins against a woman, then stepped back with an elaborate apology on his face.
'I'll be back,' I said.
'Billy Bob?' Mary Beth said.