When the Women Come Out to Dance by Elmore Leonard

Author:Elmore Leonard [Leonard, Elmore]
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2010-03-23T08:58:14.345000+00:00

TENKILLER

I.

At Kim’s funeral—people coming up to Ben with their solemn faces—he couldn’t help thinking of what his granddad Carl had said to him fifteen years ago, that he hoped Ben would have better luck with women. “We seem to have ’em around for a year or so,” the old man said, “and they take off or die on us.” It was on Ben’s mind today, along with a feeling of expectation he couldn’t help. Here he was standing ten feet from the open casket, Kim in there with her blond hair sprayed for maybe the first time, her lips sealed, a girl he lived with and loved, and he was anxious to take off. Go home as a different person. Maybe look up a girl named Denise he used to know, if she was still around. Get away from the movie business for a while.

He could’ve taken 40, a clear shot across the entire Southwest from L.A. to Okmulgee, Oklahoma, fourteen hundred miles, but took 10 instead, drove four hundred miles out of his way to look in on the Professional Bull Riders Bud Light World Challenge in Austin. Getting away was the main thing; there was no hurry to get home.

He thought he might see some of his old buddies hanging around the chutes, not a one Ben’s age still riding. Get up in your thirties and have any brains you were through with bulls. Ben entered the working end of the arena to the smell of livestock, got as far as the pens shaking hands and was taken up to the broadcast booth. An old guy he remembered as Owen still calling the rides.

Owen said, “Folks,” taking the mike from its stand as he got up, “we have a surprise visitor showed up, former world champion bull rider Ben Webster, out of Okmulgee, Oklahoma.” He said, “Ben, I liked to not recognize you without your hat on. Man, all that hair—you gone Hollywood on us or what?” Owen straight-faced, having fun with him.

Ben slipped his sunglasses off saying yeah, well, he’d been working out there the past ten years, getting by.

“Your name still comes up,” Owen said. “I see a young rider shows some style, I wonder could he be another Ben Webster. I won’t say you made it look easy, but you sure sat a bull, and didn’t appear to get off till you felt like it. Listen, I want to hear what you been doing in Hollywood, but right now, folks, we got Stubby Dobbs, a hundred and thirty-five pounds of cowboy astride a two-thousand-pound Brahma name of Nitro.” Owen turned to the TV monitor. “You see Stubby wrapping his bull rope good and tight. Ben, you don’t want your hand to slip out of there during a ride.”

“You’re gone if it does,” Ben said.

He had taken Kim to a rodeo in Las Vegas, explained how you had to stay on the bull eight seconds holding on with one hand, and you can’t touch the bull with your other hand, and she said, “Eight seconds, that’s all? Hell.

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