Jeff Jacobson - Foodchain

“I’ll be damned. Be right back,” the clown said, dropping from the fence with the other clowns and scrambling at the bull. They got Ennis off safely and lured the bull back through the gate. Green head came back, wiping at his face. Sweat trickled down through his white makeup, leaving streaks of tan skin.

“Not bad. Not a bad call at all. How’d you know?” He pulled a twenty from his oversize shorts.

“Lucky.”

“Lucky, huh?” Green head leaned back and took second, closer look Frank, this time noticing the slack, dead left side of his face. He slapped the money into Frank’s palm through the fence. “Maybe so, but it don’t matter. You still won.”

“Appreciate it,” Frank said. He went back to the stands and treated himself to a beer. The place suddenly didn’t seem so bad after all. He gulped down that beer, ordered two more, and took them back out to the ring. He handed one to Green head.

“Name’s Pine Rockatanski,” the clown said.

“Frank Winter.” He bit his tongue as he realized, too goddamn late, he’d given his real name. He blamed it on the beer and the heat.

Pine chugged his beer and sprinted out into the ring with his ambling, bowlegged gait as another teenager got bounced into the dirt. Afterwards, he asked, “In town long?”

“Not really. Just passing through, you could say.”

“Well, if you’re gonna be around tonight, there’s gonna be some more gambling opportunities, case you’re interested.”

“Depends. Mostly, I just stick to the horses. What’s the game?”

Pine grinned and spit. “You’re gonna like it. Trust me. You a drinking man?”

Frank looked out over the ring, watching as the dust hung in the still air. “Sometimes. I like to drink a six-pack before it gets warm.”

Pine laughed. “Let’s roll.”

* * * * *

Frank met the rodeo clowns in the fairground parking lot at six.

A late-model diesel pickup roared through the empty parking lot. Just as that pickup slowed to a stop, a second pickup appeared, immediately followed by a third. They hit the entrance fast, rear tires sliding, and raced each other to Frank’s car. He’d finished the rum earlier and flung it at the fence.

The two pickups slid past the long black car in a storm of dust and flecks of asphalt. Frank walked over to first pickup and introduced himself.

“You the one that took twenty off Pine?” The guy behind the wheel came across as a cowboy in an old cigarette ad. Sure enough, a fresh cigarette jutted from underneath a handlebar mustache, bobbing at the side of his mouth as he talked. He was the guy that introduced the bull riders, the guy in the rainbow Afro.

“Yeah,” Frank said, almost apologetically.

“Good. Dumbshit deserved it. Anybody that couldn’t see old Chopper was damn near dead was too goddamn dumb to look.” He stuck out his hand. “Jack Troutman. Pleased to meet ya.”

Pine climbed out of the second pickup, yelling at the guy in the third. “Pay up motherfucker! That was all mine and you know it.” Without the clown getup, which made him looked sort of mischievous, now he looked like he was two steps short of a starting a cult. He still had the beard; most of the orange had been washed out, but instead of continuing up into his hair, it stopped dead in a thick tangle of sideburn at the top of the ear. The rest of Pine’s head was bald. The back part looked particularly shaved, as if the hair had gotten confused, and instead of growing on the back of the head, it was growing on his chin. Pine made the best of it, overcompensating, embracing it, as if growing a heavy beard was somehow superior to having a long tangle of hair, like Frank.

“I got a better idea,” the other guy yelled back. “Come on over and lick my ball sweat instead.” He was the guy that had taken the money off Frank out front, and had worn the red cape at the rodeo. His pickup was at least twenty-five years old and looked as if it was being slowly eaten alive from the bottom by a fungus-like rust.

“That dipshit over there is Chuck,” Jack said.

They congregated near Jack’s tailgate as he broke out a twelve pack of Coors and a bottle of Seagram’s 7. Jack and Pine might have been brothers, all sharp angles of lean bone. Plenty of scars. Cowboy hats. Cowboy boots. Wranglers, tight around the hips, several inches too long, bunched around the ankles. Belt buckles the size of a baby’s head. Their knuckles were scabbed, swollen. Calluses and ragged fingernails. Tattoos. Bad breath.

Chuck ignored Frank and glared at Pine. “You still owe me ten bucks.” Chuck was stockier than Jack and Pine, but his skin looked slack somehow, like it was several sizes too large. He had a flattop and acne scars dotted his flabby cheeks. Wore workboots instead.

Everybody ignored him.

Jack’s twelve pack was gone in about twenty minutes, but it wasn’t a problem. Chuck had a case of warm beer in his pickup. They took turns pissing in the gravel and telling stories. They boasted about women. Card games. Fights. After a while, the clowns got all nostalgic and proud and took Frank on a tour of their hometown.

Jack drove, Frank rode shotgun as guest of honor, and Pine and Chuck rode in the back and chimed in once in a while through the open back window. They drove past the high school; Jack was the only one who graduated. The town had three bars, empty, depressing places. They hit all of them, then drove up to the Split Rock Reservoir Dam, where Jack and Pine had lost their virginity, both to the same girl. Jack and Pine teased Chuck about still being a virgin, something that Chuck loudly and repeatedly denied.

They drove past the house with the dead tree and the giant satellite dish. The children were gone. “Fuckin’ Gloucks,” Jack snapped at the disintegrating house. “Worse than fuckin’ garbage.” He hit the gas and wandered aimlessly up and down the quiet streets, and Frank pieced the history of the town together.

Whitewood had seen better days. The valley used to be rich, renowned for its wild rice. Exported it all over the world. But after a flood several years back, the rice started dying, as if the soil itself was diseased somehow. The rice would grow for a bit, under the protection of the irrigation water, but then it just slowly started to rot, until all that was left was the flooded fields chock full of muddy water and decomposing rice stalks.

* * * * *

Jack spit into a flooded rice paddy. The water was utterly black under the stars. They had stopped to take a piss by the side of an empty strip of blacktop that cut through two rice fields, each the size of several football fields. “See them lights?” Jack nodded at cluster of yellow lights at the base of some dark hills to the south. “That’s where our boss lives. Horace Sturm. His great-grandfather started the town. He’s a good man.”

“A damn good man,” Chuck echoed.

The others agreed and raised their beer cans. Frank raised his as well, eyeing the lights.

“He’s dyin’ though,” Jack said.

“Don’t say that,” Chuck said. “He’s fightin’ it.”

Pine turned to Frank and said, confidentially, “Cancer.”

“Fuckin’ brain tumor,” Jack said. “You only fight that so much.”

Frank thought of the odd, fierce little man in the restroom at the fairground.

“Doctors took it out, but they say it’ll probably come back. Bigger,” Pine said. “He went through a shitload of chemo. I mean, a shitload. Doctors wanted him to stay in the hospital, but he said, fuck that, I’m goin’ home. If I’m gonna die, then it’ll be at home. Not the hospital. And he’s been home, so far.”

“How long’s he been home?” Frank asked.

“A month,” Jack said, proud. “He’s gonna beat it.” They all took a drink, watching the lights across the black water.