THE TRAILER-HOUSE SAT IN SOLINO, TEXAS, AND FOR MOST of my childhood it had two sad turd-hounds chained underneath it. The dogs were named Lion and Tiger. When they were puppies they liked to chew fiercely on my father’s dirty socks, but once grown they lost their warlike attributes. My father kept them chained under the trailer-house anyway, in the hope that their ferocity would return if someone tried to rob us. Nobody did, so all Lion and Tiger had to do was lie in the dirt and scratch.
I grew up in the trailer-house. When I was four my mother was killed in a car wreck, a few blocks away, a fact I don’t record in order to gain sympathy. In fact, I had an abnormally happy childhood, running with a lively and sexually precocious gang of Mexican kids, in the warm sun of the Rio Grande valley.
My father, Gene McGriff, took little part in my life, and not much of a part in his own. His only affliction was a lifelong apathy, which he passed on to the dogs but not to me. Clerking in the local hardware store was good enough for him, and still is.
By the time I entered my teens I was already twice as tall as my Mexican companions, and knew that basketball was going to be my game, and it was a basketball scholarship that took me to college, though I was tired of the sport even before I got there. My real passion was gymnastics: I loved the clarity, the precision, and the utter loneliness of it. But of course it was a hopeless passion, since I was six feet five inches. One day I was watching an amateur rodeo when it occurred to me that bulldogging was just a form of applied gymnastics. You jump, you grip, you swing, and you twist, and if the timing of the four actions is precise the running animal will throw himself with his own weight, rolling right across your body and whopping himself into the ground with a satisfying thump.
When I started dogging I was looking for a passion. My world was the Texas valley, where there were no objects of the quality of a Sung vase, or women as beautiful as Cindy Sanders. As yet unaware of the stimulus of beauty, I made do with the stimulus of sport, and rapidly became a crackerjack bulldogger. I qualified for the National finals my very first year on the circuit, and soon fixed upon four seconds as a pure limit, a goal to aim for. To chase and throw a steer within four seconds would equal perfection, the best that concentration and technique could hope to achieve.
Fortunately I had an experienced hazer, an old steer-roper named Goat Goslin. I also had a powerful little dogging horse named Dandy, with a start like a cannon shot. For two years I burned up the circuit, consistently turning in times around 5 seconds. I had a 4.8 in Salinas, a 4.6 in Miles City, and a 4.3 at the Pendleton Roundup. For two or three peak months I felt I was closing in on perfection.
At that point Goat Goslin began to worry about me, though forty years of rodeo had not exactly taught him caution. He had only one ear, the other having been butted off in Tucumcari in 1946, and his left hand consisted of a thumb and first finger, the rest of it lost to a roping accident in Grand Island, Nebraska.
In his day Goat had tried his hand at every event, an eclecticism that had left him with pins in both legs, an artificial hip joint, and a little steel plate behind his left temple that he would sometimes reach up and strike a match on. A person unfamiliar with rodeo, looking him in the face for the first time, would have had a hard time accounting for the sight. A cowboy from Wolf, Wyoming, probably put it best.
“That hairy old son of a bitch looks like he dove off a three-story building into a waffle iron,” he said.
And yet Goat was actually worried about me. We were chugging along in the GMC pickup, down the east side of Oregon, the day after I posted my 4.3. It was a cold morning and we could neither get the heater to work nor the right window to roll up all the way. Goat was blowing on what was left of his crusty old hands.
“I’m worrit about you, Jack,” he said, out of a clear blue eastern Oregon sky.
“Me?” I asked. “Why worry about me? Don’t I look healthy?”
“Yeah, you do. You shore do, Jack,” Goat said, pulling at a tuft of hair that curled out of one side of his nose, as white as the covering of Momma Cullen’s worn-out chair.
He was silent for a few minutes, obviously a little embarrassed by the conversation he seemed to want to initiate.
“Jack, all you thank about is bulldoggin’,” he blurted out, awkwardly picking up a pair of wire-pinchers and looking at them as if they might contain the secret of existence.
“I guess you’re right, Goat,” I said. “I guess it is about all I think about.”
“I tolt you,” he said. “It’s all you thank about.”
“But what am I supposed to think about?”
My question stumped Goat completely. He lapsed into an aggrieved silence, staring out the window at the gray sage. I could tell he thought it unsporting of me to turn the question around and point it in his direction.
“Why hell, Jack, I don’t even thank you like rodeoin’!” he exclaimed, some thirty miles later.
It was true. I didn’t, particularly, although I had not got around to admitting this to myself. I was honestly fascinated by bulldogging, but apart from that what I really liked about the life was the opportunity it gave me to drive across vast, lonely American spaces.
Still, there was no way I could dispute Goat’s main point. The world of the arenas was a tawdry one—pridefully crude, complacently violent. I had already started to escape it by spending what spare time I had in junk shops and low-grade antique stores.
The day before, at a little store outside Pendleton called Babe’s Antiques and Plaster, filled mostly with hideous plaster lawn ornaments, I had bought what I later discovered was a Tlingit copper-and-bone dagger. I gave Babe $30 for it, just because it was pretty.
But my passion for objects was still latent, and I had not consciously considered Goat’s point.
“Well, what do you like about it, Goat?” I asked.
Goat could hardly believe I would be gauche enough to ask him two questions in the same day. On the whole he was not a talkative companion, though once in a while he could be induced to talk about some of his more impressive accidents, which he called storms.
“Got in a storm down in Laramie,” he would say. “Hung myself to a dern bull and that sucker jerked my arm too far out of the socket, they had to fly me to Dallas, to a socket doctor. Missed two rodeos because of that storm.”
My question put him into a sulk, but it’s a long way from Pendleton to Sedalia, Missouri, where we were going. By the time we were fifty or sixty miles into Idaho, Goat had looked into his soul and found the truth.
“Why hell, what I like about it is all that over-age pussy,” he said. “All them drunk grandmothers. I’d be lucky to get any other kind, bunged up as I am.”
It was true that an awful lot of middling to old ladies used rodeos as an excuse to get lit, not to mention laid.
“Some of them was my fans,” Goat added, respectfully, meaning that they had been hopeful young women when, as a young cowhand fresh out of Guthrie, Oklahoma, he had made rodeo history at the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show by riding a bull called Sudden Death—a monster black Brahma, sort of the Moby Dick of bulls, killer of two, crippler of several, and never ridden for a full regulation 8 seconds until Goat came along.
Goat was not particularly moved by his observation, but I was. Rodeo people of a certain age, staring out into the arenas around which they have spent painful and mostly disappointing lives, still talk reverently about the night Goat Goslin rode Sudden Death. It was a bittersweet thought that all over the west there were old ladies eager or at least willing to grapple with Goat, in a pickup seat or miserable motel room, because of a brief, dust-cloaked ride thirty-five years back down the highway, that most of them had not even been there to see.
But whether they had seen it or not it was the diamond in the popcorn of their lives—an event that only lasted 8 seconds.
A month later, at the National Finals Rodeo, I nearly hit perfection, throwing a steer in 4.1 seconds. It won me a championship saddle and a belt buckle that would have stopped a bazooka bullet. When I let the steer up I felt sad—the same sadness I felt driving out of De Queen with the Sung vase. I was looking downward from a peak, and my descent was swift. A month later I was taking 10 and 12 seconds to throw steers I should have thrown in 5 or 6. But I lacked even a vague notion of what I might want to do next, and kept on desultorily dogging steers.
In early February the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show rolled around. On the first night, Goat was sitting on the fence by the bucking chutes, smoking and watching, as he had done for thousands of nights.
Tex Ritter—Goat’s favorite singer—was there that night. During one of the breaks in the action he sang “Hillbilly Heaven”—it was not long before he departed for it himself. The crowd burst into tears, overcome by the memory of immortals like Patsy Cline and Cowboy Copas. Tex didn’t sing his well-known rodeo classic, “Bad Brahma Bull,” fearing, perhaps, that it would be an augury.
Twenty minutes after he sang, a very bad and very black Brahma bull smashed through the chute gate, threw his rider, narrowly missed killing a clown, then whirled and leaped the arena fence right where Goat was sitting. The fence, like the gate, smashed as if it were plywood. The bull came down with Goat right underneath him, the bull’s front feet hitting Goat in the chest—his cigarette was still in his mouth and still lit when he died, by which time the bull had trotted back to the bullpen, as placid as a milk-pen calf.
So died Goat Goslin, a small legend in his own time. Everyone agreed that the spirit of Sudden Death had finally come back to claim him. Some went so far as to allow that it was fitting.
But a lot of hard-drinking, fast-fucking grandmothers had lost their hero.
I sold Dandy, my wonderful dogging horse, that night. The next day I accompanied Goat home to Guthrie and paid for his funeral. The minute it ended I left for Houston, with a station wagon half full of what Boog Miller called Indian doodads, sure of nothing except that I had gained an exit, and lost a friend.