Going Local by Jamie Harrison

Author:Jamie Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2024-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

THAT NIGHT JULES took in the Wrangle from the inside out, listening to the national anthem and the cheers and the dull thuds from behind the chutes and concession stands, booting teenage miscreants off the grounds and confiscating their beers without bothering to write them up. The schedule was the same every night: bareback, saddle broncs, the clown’s act, more saddle broncs, team roping, and the ladies’ exhibition; steer wrestling, calf roping, and more clown; barrel racing and two sessions of bull riding. The bulls and bucking horses had names like Angel Dust and Twist and Shout, Goose Step and Close Encounter.

Genie was working a chute. Jules had never seen him surlier, and was amused by the fact that Genie couldn’t slack off in this job without losing his macho. He didn’t want to push him over the line, and walked to the edge of the grandstand to watch the ladies’ exhibition. He looked up in the grandstand and a white arm flashed at him. Diane, grinning like a fiend. Everett, who’d always had a horror of all things animal, was next to her, acting like he knew what he was talking about, and Jules wondered what he made of it all, whether what had gone on two nights earlier made any difference to him.

Sylvia and her fellow maniacs called themselves the Lucas Loonies, after a female bronc and trick rider named Tad Barnes Lucas, who’d made a fortune in the thirties. Two of Sylvia’s aunts had won prizes throughout the Western circuits during World War II, but women had been barred from most rodeo events besides barrel racing since the fifties. Most of the women in the group spent the rest of the year at more polite cutting horse events, and the ones who were Sylvia’s age, who’d given up bronc riding for safer breakaway roping, rode at the rodeo for reasons that had less to do with feminism than boredom. Half of them were overeducated readers of South American fiction, like Sylvia, with too much money and too much time, part of the last generation of women who wouldn’t automatically work. They could have run corporations, but this wasn’t part of the marital plan, and so they opted for a little self-imposed pain. The Lucas Loonies were a practical measure, too: Blue Deer didn’t have the money for a traveling trick show, trained buffalo and the like, and the once popular wild horse stampede (won by the first person who saddled up and rode, no matter how long the moment lasted) had been ruled out for insurance reasons. Greased pigs and barrels were a treat saved for the fair rodeo. Sylvia, eternal board member, had taken a typically hands-on approach a decade earlier, and only in the last two had she given up saddle broncs for breakaway roping, which only required a high speed chase, an accurate toss, and a braking horse.

She did a tidy job the first night out, only six seconds to the flag, and he

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