Blue Rodeo Read online

  Blue Rodeo

  A NOVEL

  Jo-Ann Mapson

  for Jack:

  listen up

  Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once, beautiful and brave.

  Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something that needs our love.

  RAINER MARIA RILKE

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Blue Dog

  1

  To Owen Garrett’s keen sheepherder’s eyes, it appeared entirely likely…

  2

  For the first time in six months, Margaret Yearwood had…

  3

  Dear Lord, I’m standing here with an armful of sopping…

  4

  Reluctantly Margaret handed Owen back the plate with his half…

  5

  Storm clouds,” Margaret said at the front door when Owen…

  6

  It took most of Owen’s inner strength and all his…

  7

  Dusted over with snow in the distance, Shiprock Monument had…

  8

  Hold off starting that fire,” Owen said a few days…

  9

  Red chile ristras hung in drooping, snow-dusted arcs from the…

  Riverwall

  10

  After three months at Riverwall, Peter didn’t need one of…

  11

  No!” Amparo Hidalgo slapped Peter’s right hand away from the…

  12

  Instead of a phone call in response to his letter—his…

  13

  To Maggie’s eyes, downtown Blue Dog sparkled like the glitter…

  14

  Too early on Christmas Day, Maggie woke to the sound…

  15

  Hey, pretty lady,” Joe Yazzi called to Maggie as he…

  16

  Dammit, Joe,” Nori said, rubbing her arms and legs. “Don’t…

  17

  Usually Owen liked nothing better after making love than Maggie’s…

  18

  Never mind what the poets said about April being the…

  Blue Rodeo

  19

  Summer was on its way out again, the days growing…

  20

  His mother was painting again. Huge canvases that bore no…

  About the Author

  Other Books by Jo-Ann Mapson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Heartfelt gratitude to Terry Bennan; everyone at the California School for the Deaf; Craig Candelaria; Gil Carrillo; Mark Chapman; audiologist Renee Dobkin; the Farmington, New Mexico, Chamber of Commerce; Earlene Fowler; Stuart Johnstone; Rich Linder; C. J. Mapson, for keeping me current on everything Western; Martin Nava, my language expert; T. Jefferson Parker, who lent me Cat’s inspiring song; Tracy Robert; and to Camp Pine: Clark Hepworth, Patrick Kersey, Marilyn Shultz, Alexis Taylor, and Amanda Wray.

  Very special thanks to my agent, Deborah Schneider, and to my editor, Janet Goldstein, and her associate, Peternelle Van Arsdale, for their continued friendship, support, encouragement, and wisdom.

  Blue Dog, New Mexico, and all of its inhabitants are products of the author’s imagination, as are the Riverwall School for the Deaf, its faculty, students, and the town in which it is located.

  Blue Dog

  A man’s work is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those one or two things in whose presence his heart first opened.

  ALBERT CAMUS

  1

  TO OWEN GARRETT’S KEEN SHEEPHERDER’S EYES, IT APPEARED entirely likely that the woman in the blue shirt and red panties running back and forth between the water faucet and the two copulating dogs was the Californian. First off, the red panties were the itty-bitty lace variety. You didn’t come by those easily in a town like Blue Dog unless you ordered off one of those fancy color catalogs. If you did, the folks who worked at the post office got to know your weakness, and before long everyone from Shiprock to Silver City would hear about it. From the way she ran—high up on the balls of her feet—he figured probably she was a jogger. When they weren’t driving convertibles, Californians ran everywhere, pumping arms and legs and inhaling diesel fumes from Mercedes, all in the name of health. Every time she banked and turned from the water faucet and raced toward the dogs—hands cupped in front of her, making good time but not good enough to keep hold of the water—he could see those panties strain for all they were worth, a deep Comstock cherry-pie red that graced the tops of the longest legs he’d seen all at one stretch in maybe fifteen years. It was common knowledge they all dressed like that out there, you know, certified members of a nation of crazy people. Women who never wore brassieres except as outerwear, doing aerobic exercises twenty-four hours a day in neon-colored girdles. The men, too. What kind of man was it who voluntarily put on tights and went out among them? True, they had to exercise, because they never did any hard work aside from pushing a computer button now and again or sending one another a fax. And in the state of California it was a sin to be soft. Little wonder they all got skin cancer and had nervous breakdowns every fifteen minutes. Good Lord, had she come to Blue Dog to get over one? She might also be one of those New Age crystal-rubbers searching for a cure-all to the kind of depression that came from idleness and too much money.

  As Owen pondered these questions, he sat straight atop RedBow, his twelve-year-old quarter horse, an animal with just enough mustang thrown in to keep things exciting. Together they surveyed the woman’s lack of progress. Hopeful, Owen’s three-legged blue Queensland heeler, was locked up tight to the Californian’s sorrel bitch, one of those tall skinny dogs that probably cost two months’ salary and was too nervous to finish a meal Long Legs wasn’t having much luck breaking them up, though with handfuls of water she was managing to sprinkle them in a pretty kind of way. It brought to mind old Father Morales down at the reservation with his holy-water rattle and the Easter group baptism.

  Might even be that the dogs appreciated the water. It was a warm day, somewhere in the high eighties, could hit ninety before noon. He could see she was about to give up now that it was clear the dogs were set on following nature’s urgings. He watched her stamp her long, bare foot and give out a holler of frustration. She had powerful lungs, and the yelling indicated she was plenty angry, probably about something or other that happened long before the dogs got into it.

  Owen Garrett knew about anger. How it could turn you to a chunk of crumbling asphalt, all tarred up, just stinking in the sun. Anger could change your whole life. It had his. He hoped it wasn’t like that for this woman. She was built lean, not too heavy up top—a characteristic that caused most men he knew to stammer and beg like fools. Owen himself didn’t care for that kind of breast on a woman. As his father used to say: More than a mouthful’s just being greedy. Though Owen wasn’t clear about the greed part, he knew he liked his women trim but not rib-showing skinny. She was five ten or so, he figured, close to his own height, but at least thirty or forty pounds lighter. Nice little slope to her tummy—he like a tummy on a woman—it usually meant she took a relaxed view of things. Her curly hair, all messed up, had a healthy red glow to it in the sunshine. It looked like she’d just woken up. And wasn’t that a handsome thing! Some women were at their best in the morning, smiling at you over the coffeepot, reliving what you two had done the night before. Others were downright beastly until they’d poured half that pot of coffee on down their stringy throats and had a firm hold of your paycheck. On God’s own earth it came down to basically those two types of women, whether you were in the country or the city. Ones who wouldn’t flinch reaching up inside a laboring ewe to yank out a turned lamb, and the rest, who didn’t want to do anything but shop, listen to the radio
, and put on layer after layer of pink nail polish—like Sheila.

  Half a day’s drive northeast, in the skyscraper- and smog-filled city of Denver, Owen’s ex-wife rode around Larimer Square in her little black 600 SL. Small as a wind-up toy, costing more than any house should, the car was a gift from Sheila’s current husband, Hal, the real estate magnate. Old Hal, who could do no wrong. Owen and Sheila’s daughter, Sara Kay, had turned twenty years old this last spring. Living at the university, she was studying on something that she assured him “would damn straight keep me from ending up like either one of my parents.” Well, as much as Sara Kay wanted that statement to wound her daddy, he recognized it as ambition, and Owen Garrett was the first man to applaud aspirations, having come to his own so late in life.

  You name it, he’d worked it. Offshore oil-drilling rigs in Texas, pumping gas, peddling shocks and tires in Flagstaff, Arizona, to road-weary families stopping off at the Grand Canyon and then later that same day heading east on their way to Meteor Crater for a six-dollar disappointment. He’d even done a short stint at UNM, where all he had to do was dress up in his cowboy clothes, pose for art students, and they got him twenty-five dollars an hour.

  He wasn’t uneducated. He’d finished high school, just barely, because when you fed the superintendent’s cows at dawn, he was more than glad to give you a ride on down the hill with him. He kept up. He read books he traded back and forth with his Navajo friend, Joe Yazzi. Growing up on working ranches had given him a solitary nature and supplied him with an overload of patience, which certainly helped out with Sara Kay, who took after her momma.

  Patience had given him the courage to quit all that and change his life after that sorry night in southern Colorado. Once a day he forced himself to think about it, to give it a full ten minutes by his eighteen-dollar Timex, to assess the pros and cons of continuing to live his life piecemeal or driving north to the nearest sheriff’s office to confess his part in what happened.

  After that, he’d made a deal with himself. He wasn’t allowed to think about it anymore until the sun had gone all the way down and come back up again. A man could drive himself mad just thinking. Too much thinking turned your nights to enemies.

  He’d tried following the Big Book, going to AA meetings and working his twelve-step program, but after awhile those people started to get on his nerves with their chain-smoking and holier-than-thou attitudes. Step eight stalled him: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Did you go clear back to breaking your brother’s toys, or even further, to being born to your momma at a time when she should have been done with mothering, had put in her hard time rearing four other children? To this day he still puzzled over it. Certainly you could make restitution up to a point—right most wrongs—and what he’d done was about as wrong as they came, but chasing after sainthood twenty-seven hours a day swung things just as far out of balance as too much drinking did.

  Just because he’d quit didn’t erase his status of being a drunk. That much he did buy. He accepted the fact that he was, for all time, a drunk who no longer drank. He amended those twelve steps and lived by them as best he could, offering his insurmountable worries to his Higher Power. There were times he even went back to AA—when a job took him to a new town or the guilts steeped him in a terrible brew of self-pity—he’d search out a meeting in one of the churches or American Legion halls, and listen, both ears open, to what other folks had to say. Saying the words of greeting always started out the same—a confession that stuck in his throat like too-sweet cake: Hello. My name is Owen, and I’m an alcoholic. The rush of kindly voices that came charging back: Hi, Owen! never failed to cheer him, to reassure him he could blend into the background of whatever small town he’d landed in. And for ten full minutes each day, each minute a considerable chunk of time when you weighed them against one another, he forced himself to recall one particular day seven years back, in as much detail as he could summon.

  He was a forty-five-year-old drunk cowboy, tanked up on bullheadedness and wounded pride, who had let his anger get the best of him. Owen had been working cattle on the Watson ranches that summer, and came into town after four straight weeks only to receive Sheila’s message: I can’t take it anymore. You gone all the time and me here with no more than two nickels to rub together. I’m taking Sara Kay and going with Mickey. He loves me and that’s that.

  Before he could cry himself to sleep in a fifth of blended whiskey, he got into a pointless fight with a young man in a goofy straw Shepler’s hat. Rattlesnake hatband, complete with fanged mouth agape in the center and painted chicken feathers collaring the unlucky reptile like a Vegas showgirl—he could still see the thing, clear as unwanted ice on a cattle tank. He remembered a skinny guy who couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, one of those types with a mouth as big as his rodeo belt buckle. After Owen accidentally bumped his arm at the pool table, spilling just a little of his beer, the fellow began needling him, calling him Pops, making fun of his duct-taped boots and soiled Wranglers, his battered hat with the cattleman’s crease. Owen remembered leaning his face into the young man’s personal space and giving him a chuck under the chin. See here, I’ll buy you another two inches of beer, but I’ve heard about enough, son. Then nothing specific, just the blind rush of anger and so much motion, the guy coming at him with a pool cue. The cue bounced off his hand and the lighter half of it flew against three men standing at the bar. It was the year of all those terrible fires. Ranchers were going broke hauling water. The fight arced through the bar crowd the way one of those fires went about creating its own wind, crossing boundaries randomly, eating whatever lay in its path. Liquor spilled into it like gasoline. Tired-out strangers who’d been sharing drinks and listening to Ernest Tubbs “walk the floor” on the jukebox suddenly were raising their voices and clenching fists, letting go a year’s frustration. At the sound of the first shattering bottle, Owen brought his fist down on the smart-mouthed knucklehead who wouldn’t let up.

  Oh, certainly, now he knew the psychology of the incident. He was more hurt than angry. It was Sheila he wanted to go after. The idea that Mickey the stereo salesman probably had her on her back as she hooked her legs over his shoulders was killing him. He couldn’t shake the image of the idiot jackhammering her with all six of his cheap-suit-and-jasper-bola-tie inches. A man didn’t need a headshrinker to figure that out—but instead of telling his wife what he thought of her judgment, this unknown bigmouth became the recipient of his mixed-up sorrow. Blindly, he swung. When he next looked up, there was blood running out the man’s ear and his smart mouth was quietly sagging to the left. In his left hand Owen was holding the weighted end of the pool cue. He couldn’t remember anything after the first punch. His own teeth felt loose. He tasted blood. His knuckles were ripped open, exposing tendon, and a warm liquid was running down his left cheek. He reached up to wipe it away and his fingers came back bloody. A quart of whiskey under his belt, he experienced a sober moment of perfect clarity. He knew that the man under his fist was dead, and in all likelihood he had delivered the telling blow. He let go of the man’s shirt, picked up his own hat, and exited the bar through the front door, still holding the pool cue he would later burn out by the dam. In all the chaos no one noticed him leaving. He could not afford to look back. After a night out by the dam, he sent Sheila a five-hundred-dollar money order for Sara Kay’s birthday, bought an old pickup and horse trailer at the New Mexico border, drove straight through to El Paso, and took a summer job breaking horses for a wealthy heart doctor who owned four hundred acres.

  Looks like whoever gave you that scar was after your eye. You mind if I ask how it happened?

  Car wreck.

  I’ve done my share of stitching. I’d say knife wound—am I close?

  Owen had kept his face immobile, though his lies felt like they were crawling all over him. Your fences look like they could use some tending, doctor. I’m handy with fences.

  Only the next
winter did he find out the stereo salesman was history. Sara Kay’d been in the hospital with a ruptured appendix, destroyed that her father hadn’t even called to see how she’d fared under the scalpel. That was the end of her loving him as that larger-than-life daddy, and maybe that was for the best. They wrote letters every once in awhile. She told him how many A’s she’d racked up on her report card, the colors of the ribbons she’d garnered in the last gymkhana. But there was only so much you could tell a child on paper. Sara needed new heroes, and Sheila gave her plenty between that stereo salesman and the real estate king she finally married. Well, a change of pasture made for a fatter calf. Hal certainly could provide in the money department better than Owen, who felt like he was always trying to keep the wolf from delivering pups on his front step.

  Sometimes he missed Sara Kay so bad his heart felt herniated. His feisty little girl, the one who rode out the bucks and shot a rifle as easily as she tied bows in her braids. At thirteen she’d been a champion barrel racer, once breaking seventeen seconds. Ladies and gentlemen, first place to Sara Kay…! She won a silver buckle, but it might well have turned to gold next to her face-splitting smile. Whenever he felt the urge to take inventory, Sara Kay emerged as the one good act he had done on this earth. He hoped she had kept up with her riding. She was a woman now, complete with her own set of bitternesses tucked away inside her, festering.